News & Events A Conversation with Susan Choi and Laila Lalami

- It's wonderful to have you here tonight. This year we have a special reason to celebrate LitFest, this is the fifth anniversary of Amherst LitFest and it has been such a tremendous success. I think we can say at this point it's not just a annual event but it's actually a tradition, a highly anticipated one. One that's embraced by the students, staff, faculty, and community. And it's really become a tradition that we count it. I'm really excited to be here tonight. We're gonna be treated to a conversation with 2019 National Book Award winner Susan Choi and 2019 National Book Award finalist Laila Lalami. The conversation will be hosted by our own Professor Judith Frank, English and, yes, you're allowed to cheer. English and creative writing and herself the author of two books, both of them nominated for the Lambda Literary prize. This event is part of the National Book Awards on Campus Program, which we cohost in partnership with the National Book Foundation. And we welcome Natalie Green, who will come up in just a second. Sorry, I mislead you there Natalie. I had just a, I have just, I know. I hear my name I leap. We are one of only a handful of colleges or universities in partnership with the National Book Foundation and we're extremely honored and pleased by this partnership. Thank you, Natalie. The LitFest is the brain child of Jen Acker. Jennifer Acker is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Common, which as many of you know is a literary magazine based here at Amherst College. The Common publishes two print issues a year and host a lively online platform. And if you haven't checked out their website I highly recommended it. Among other things you can hear really wonderful recordings of contemporary poets reading their work. In addition to editing The Common, Jen directs the magazine's literary publishing internship, which gives our students an opportunity to prepare for careers in writing and editing and also a chance to live inside a literary culture. Jen is also the author of a highly acclaimed novel of her own, "The Limits of the World", which was published in 2019. A book called by our own alum Lauren Groff, "Smart, compassionate, and elegant." I think we'd all agree and more. In 2019 The Common was awarded the Writing Award, a very prestigious recognition for literary magazines. And the award citation praised The Common and now I quote, "For bringing into being a new generation "of readers and thinkers "through its exemplary resources for teachers "and its devotion to elevating new writers." I wanna congratulate Jen Acker and her staff for this accolade, the latest of the accolades for The Common but also to thank her for this LitFest without her it would not have become the fabulous tradition that it is. Thank you, Jen. And congratulations. Now in a moment, soon though, Natalie Green public programs manager at the National Book Foundation will introduce tonight's guests. I just wanna end by thanking other people who did so much to help organize LitFest. First our amazing special events team in the communications department led by Austin Hewitt. Austin I don't know where you are. Oh, there you are. This is the best events team I can possible imagine anywhere in the world. They're just incredible. Thank you, Austin. Applause for Austin. Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, who has worked on LitFest I think since the first year. Is that right, Jen? Is that right, Jane? Where are you Jane? There you are. Thank you Jane. The amazing Paul Gallegos, the Director of Student Activities. Paul are you here? No. Well he does an amazing job. And Darryl Harper Professor of Music and Director of our Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Darryl, where are you? Darryl. And now I'm delighted to introduce Natalie Green.

- That is the best three time introduction I've ever received. I'm Natalie Green and I'm the public programs manager at the National Book Foundation. I'm thrilled to welcome you to this evening's event. Our fifth year we've been doing all five along side Amherst College for their LitFest to celebrate National Book Award honored authors and their work. Many thanks to Jen, her LitFest team, Amherst and the Croxton Lecture Fund for making tonight possible. To start off I'm just gonna bore you a little bit and tell you about what the National Book Foundation does and what we're up to. Since 1950 we've presented the National Book Awards to honor the best literature in America. And through the support of new founders from the Mellon Foundation to Ford and Rockefeller, and more we've been massively able to expand our education and public programing. Working year-round to reach readers everywhere. Since 2018 we've met over 10,000 audience members, donated over one million books to public housing authorities and visited 39 states across the country. And you can ask my amazing boss Lisa Lucas that we're not stopping until we reach all 50. We're just so honored to continue celebrating National Book Award honored authors and their work all nation wide. And if you're interested in learning more about what we're up to Victoria who's amazing, who's on the LitFest team and our email sign up is downstairs. This evening's conversation features 2019 National Book Award winner Susan Choi and finalist Laila Lalami on the power of fiction and the point of view. I'll introduce our authors and moderator for the evening Judith Frank. After the folks on stage chat we'll open up to the audience for a few questions. You all should have note cards. Any questions will be collected during the conversation. Following the program the authors will be signing books which are for sale in the back of the room thanks to Amherst Books. And now I'll introduce our authors. Susan Choi's first novel, "The Foreign Student" won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, "American Woman" was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, "A Person of Interest" was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel "My Education" received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, I'm gonna keep going, "Trust Exercise" and her first book for children, "Camp Tiger" came out in 2019. "Trust Exercise" won the National Book Award for fiction. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation. Choi teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn. Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She's the author of four novels including "The Moor's Account", which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her most recent novel, "The Other Americans" was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper's, and The New York Times. She's received fellowships from British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation. And is currently a tenured professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, a work of nonfiction, I can't wait to celebrate called "Conditional Citizens" will be published this spring. And our moderator, Judith Frank is the author of a book of criticism, "Common Ground "Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor" and two novels, "Crybaby Butch", which one a 2004 Lambda Literary Award and "All I love and Know". In 2008 Frank received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. They've been a resident at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and have published short fiction in the Massachusetts Review, Other Voices, and Best Lesbian Love Stories 2005. They teach English and creative writing here at Amherst and our currently working on a novel about race, reproduction, and queerness. Give it up for our authors.

- So is this, it's working, great. So we're gonna start, welcome to Amherst College, first of all we're so happy to have you. We're gonna start with a short reading from each of our authors and we decided that Susan is going first. We did.

- Hi everyone. Thanks for being here. We decided I would go first and I'm going to try not to over explain the short passage that I'll read from "Trust Exercise". So that it's not completely incomprehensible. We're in a performing arts high school in the 1980s with some theater students. Sarah and David are our main focus right now. They've just had a disastrous breakup and just in time for their catastrophic breakup they have to go to movement class, which is taught by a brand new very enthusiastic teacher from France, whose accent I will try not to imitate while I read. Although sometimes the ham in me gets the better of me. The Black Box was just as it sounded, a black box of a room with a large platform stage at the center, low enough to require no stairs. During performances, black drapery made the aisles behind the risers the backstage but today the drapery is furled, the box is open to its walls and its faraway ceiling criss-crossed by the lighting catwalks. Ms. Rozots says, "They are to walk, walk, walk, "move, move, move "all through this marvelous space "they must make themselves free to explore every inch." Not the catwalks or ladders, no. Laughter. All right you are all very clever. You will explore all terrestrial inches. "In literature," says Ms. Rozot, "there is an idea called automatic writing." "You write without resting your pen." "The pen most keep moving and moving, "perhaps it is writing, "why do the fuck do I have to keep writing?" More laughter. Shocked and charmed at her profanity. Her profanity tinged as it is with her accent is more charming than shocking. Is it possible they could respect her? Well, this unbroken movement of the pen unlocks the secrets within and if the pen can do this than how much more the whole body? Let your body lead you, your only order to it never stop moving. Otherwise it is in charge. I will help you with music. Oh, no. No, they can't respect her. It's perfectly ridiculous. And the music she's playing Cat Steven, The Moody Blues. Satirically then they walk, walk, walk making faces at each other, swinging their arms, bouncing on the balls of their feet, speeding up comically so they're marching like robots. Whenever Norbert and Colin pass each other they make absurd faces. Then when they pass each other again they both make absurd faces and leap into the air still without breaking stride. This behavior spreads, evolves. Most of the boys adore "Monty Python" and embarrass the girls at lunch with their flawlessly recalled and completely unfunny enactments of skits by which they, the performers are slain with hilarity. In the Black Box the boys do silly walks and then pratfalls-in-motion to show they are slain with hilarity. By in large the girls grow increasingly serious as they boys grows increasingly ludicrous. The girls no longer walk they glide, they skim, they slice. The music changes to classical stuff without words. The girls begin taking on speed in additional layer is added now high speed without hitting one another. They're weaving a mad tapestry with their movements. Some unpredictably changed direction in the hope of collisions. No matter what they do, no, no matter how subversively they do it. Ms. Rozots cries from the sidelines, "Good." "Move, move, move." "Ah, you are making something." Indeed they are. Somehow silliness dies. All the theatrical forms of movement, the silly walks, the pratfalls but also the arm swinging, I am carefree, and the deliberate direction changing, I am a rogue, leach out of the room, unexpected collectivity has slowly emerged in its place. Perhaps most important embarrassment has been given up. Without their having noticed it, they're no longer embarrassed. Their speed has equalized until they're all traveling at about the same rate. Their winding paths, their clover leafs, and hairpins, and loops knit some underling pattern as if they learned this maypole dance beside their parents as children. As if it binds them to something and makes of them something. Sarah's face is streaming tears. At the point where she oughta curve left or curve right she goes straight and plunges out the Black Box doors and down the hall running, her speed snatching the tears from her face. Thanks.

- So good evening. So I'll be reading from the "The Other Americans." And this book is about a Moroccan family in the Mojave desert, in a small town in the Mojave desert in California, if I can find my page there. And it's about family whose members have become sort of alienated from one another and they are brought together again by the death of the father. And it's told from nine different perspectives. And I'll be reading a short section told from the perspective of the dead man's daughter. From the nest above the swamp cooler came the cooing of the turtledove. It had woken me up earlier that morning and now I lay in bed watching a spider climb the window screen. The sky behind it a brilliant blue. The spider moved with elegance and without hurry, unconcerned about the past or the future, one as immaterial as the other. Time was passing, nine days now but I felt stuck as if I'd only just heard that my father had died. In the Muslim tradition the period of mourning lasts 40 days. Why 40? Moses spent 40 days without bread or water before receiving the covenant on Mount Sinai. Between his baptism and his return to Galilee Jesus was 40 days in the wilderness resisting temptation. Mohammed was 40-years-old when he secluded himself in the cave at Hira and Gabriel appeared to him. 40 was a potent number, a promise that ease would come after hardship. That good tidings would follow bad. But my grief would not end in 40 days or 40 weeks, or ever it seemed. All I had left of my father were memories each as fragile as a wisp of smoke. I thought about his last visit to me, the previous spring when he'd come to watch me perform at the Botanical Gardens. He'd worn a pinstriped suit and a black tie and looking at his reflection in the full length mirror in the hallway of my apartment he had said, "Nor-eini wait." I was already at the door, the folder with my music tucked under my arm, my hand half way to the light switch. Wait, Nor-eini. My father took off his jacket and sitting on my piano bench brushed his shoes until they shone. He wanted to look his best for the performance. Come to think of it he always wanted to look his best when he ventured out of his work clothes as if any trip into the wider world, the whiter world was a test he might not pass some day if he wasn't careful. At the Botanical Gardens he'd asked a passer by for a photo of us standing by the marquee with my name on it. Where was that picture now? In a drawer under my bedroom window or somewhere on the desk I shared with Margo. I'd have to look for it when I got back. I needed to get back to my new piece too. I wanted to finish it in time for fall fellowship deadlines. Then the cabin phone ran startling me, it was an old-fashioned landline phone and its sound was urgent and bothersome. I dragged myself out of bed to pick it up, holding the receiver close with one hand and working with the other to untangle the cord. The line crackled. "Can I speak to Mr. Guerraoui?" a man asked. He's voice was high pitched, almost feminine in tone and he spoke with a European accent I couldn't place. "Guerraoui" I corrected, my heart skipping a beat. "Sorry, it's hard to make out the handwriting "on this order." "I only have the carbon copy in front of me." "Is Mr. Guerraoui home?" "No, he's not here." "He passed away." There was a moment of shocked silence on the other end of the line. In that time I relieved my disbelief at the news of my father's death. The sight of him in his burial shroud. How cold his skin had been when I touched it. The grief and anger that took turns inside my heart. "I'm , I'm sorry," the man said. "I didn't know." "I called the cellphone number he left me "but it went to voicemail "and no one ever answered this one until today." "He didn't give you the house number?" "No, just this one." After a moment the man drew his breath again. "Who should I talk to about getting paid for the balance?" "What balance?" "I'm sorry, who did you say you were?" "The balance on the engagement ring he ordered in April." "This is Maurice from Maurice and Dana's Designs." I had trouble parsing the phrase engagement ring. It didn't seem to belong to a language I could speak or understand. And that feeling persisted even after I wrote down the address for the jewelry shop, drove to Palm Springs to find it and was buzzed inside by Maurice. I was clinging to the possibility that there was some kind of misunderstanding. That my father had meant anniversary ring even though my mother had developed an allergy to detergent some years ago and couldn't wear rings of any kind. "I'm here about the ring," I said, nearly out of breath as I walked into the shop. Thank you.

- What were the enabling insights or hunches whether life insights or craft insights that helped you launch these novels into being?

- What if there were no enabling instincts?

- That's totally. Next question.

- No. Well I know, I love your question but I just for my own, for this particular novel it was actually the disabling of my ability to finish the novel that I was actually working on at the time. I had been trying, and trying, and trying to finish a novel that I still haven't finished. And one day I thought I just have to write something totally different. And I decided to write a very short story about a pair of teenage lovers who neither of whom was licensed to drive and they live in a place that has no mass transit so they can't hook up. And this was the very simple conflict of the story and I thought this will be easy.

- I love the part where you say this will be easy. I think these are very necessary lies that we have to tell ourselves in order to actually begin the writing of a book. And it was certainly a lie I told myself when I started working on this book. The book before this one was a historical novel that had taken five years to research and write and I thought, I'm gonna write something contemporary and it'll be easy, no research. And I discovered very quickly after I began writing that that wasn't true. But what got me started with this book was actually, I suppose it is a personal insight, which is that in the summer of 2014 I was on vacation and I got a text in the middle of night from my sister telling me that our father had taken gravely ill so basically we had to scrabble and take a plane and go to Morocco to visit with him. And he's fine now. But when I came back to the US I started to consider some of the sort of unintended consequences of decisions that you make when you're in your 20s. So I became immigrant completely by chance. I came to this country to go to graduate school and had no intention of staying here but I met someone, yada, yada, yada. And then I became an immigrant. And so then I started to think about sort of these long-term unforeseen consequences. And I thought it might be interesting to write a book or to write a story rather about a family that where the parents are immigrants from Morocco and some of the unintended consequences of their decision to come here.

- So I should have said the necessary self delusions.

- Yes.

- And laziness a little bit too, right. . I wanted to, both of these novels are interesting from a point of view standpoint and I know Laila that you started with only a few points of view, right and expanded over time. Was it always in first-person or it was also in third-person? So I was wondering if you could talk about those decisions a little bit?

- I know it sounds a little insane. When I did the first draft of this book it was in the third-person and it focused on three characters. And so it had alternating chapters from their perspectives but it was still in the third-person limited. It was from the point of view of the daughter, her love interest, and the detective, and I thought that was all I needed in order to get the story out because it was the three main strands of the story. And at about the third draft I realized and after having a conversation with my editor as well that it just wasn't enough because I was having trouble moving some parts of the story. And also because I had written very or what I thought were very interesting characters and none of them were getting a chance to tell their story. And the more I included of their voices the more complicated, and interesting, and juicy the story became. So I continued to expand until I hit on what I thought was the perfect number. And the other decision too that I made at the same time was to try it in the first-person. Once I tried it in the first-person the book sort of opened up for me and I became much more invested in it and I wanted to work on it. I couldn't wait to work on it every day. And so then after that it happened very quickly another few years and then it was done.

- And Susan I'm interested in, well there are a lot of point of view things in this novel but the I that interweaves with Karen's narrative, right, with the third-person Karen, did that happen soon in the writing? Was it something that you wove in after making it in third-person like the rest of the novel? How did that come to be?

- Yeah, it came to be really accidental again. Although I just wanna quickly say of your, I love all the voices in your book and one of the things that I think is brilliant about the first-person is that it feels like testimony. And the testimony starts in certain ways conflicting and in certain ways like--

- Reinforcing.

- Supplementing.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, and I loved the way in which you would sort of cut away from a moment and then we would pick up in a different characters perspective on that same moment but discover how differently they viewed it. And I think that was--

- Thank you.

- How nice.

- The dead man.

- Yeah.

- And the dead man also that decision to include his point of view as well.

- Yeah, which I loved.

- Thank you.

- But I think the reason I was so struck with it is it's really similar to what I was trying to do as well. So what had happened with "Trust Exercise" which is really a series of accidents. First the accident of trying to write a short story and then it wasn't easy and I never finished it. It never became a story but a book. Is that I wrote this first section that's in the third-person, I read from it, really up to the point at which I was just sick of it myself and I just put it down. Because I was still trying to write this other book. It was not what I was really doing. And so I put it down for so long that I had started it in, I don't even know how many years ago but by the time it had been, you know it languished until mid to late summer of 2016 it was still languishing. And around that time I had become very preoccupied by other developments in the larger world. And the main sensation I kept having at that time that we all remember so well because it's still happening was why is this story that's the story of my life and my country, and my experience, why is the story being told by someone who is telling it in such, in way that's so completely offensive and just hostile to my entire existence. I felt as if someone was telling my story but telling it all wrong. You know all sorts of different aspects of our national conversation felt like a story that was suddenly being told... in a really damaging way. And it was interesting because you know I had started ideally thinking about this material that I had been writing and I thought, I wonder if there are any people in that world, in the world of that story who also feel really misused, and ill treated, and spoken for in the worst possible way.

- Yeah.

- By that narration. And it sort of occurred to me that you know maybe there were people, characters in that world who are angry and disagreed. And as soon as I thought of it I realized yes, Karen, Karen. I remember this very minor character and I thought Karen is mad. She's just mad about what's being said about her and her experience. She just doesn't agree.

- I like that you sent her to therapy for many years also. The way that her mom who's lovely at the end of the first part then becomes unlovely and her narration is fantastic. What did you think was offensive about the first, like where did you locate the offensiveness in the first version? I was gonna ask, did you always know that this was somebody else's, that this was Sarah narrative but clearly you didn't, right, when you were writing it?

- Yeah.

- What did you find offensive about it?

- It wasn't so much that I thought it was offensive as I thought this is a story that involves many, many people but is being told from one perspective and inevitably when one perspective tells the story there is going to be someone who feels that the story isn't be told correctly. And that was where Karen sort of bloomed. You know Karen had been someone who was so minor and I think that that was the beginning where I thought you know what if she's siting around thinking I'm not minor, I'm not marginal. And so that was where her anger started. And then I thought well, why is she angry?

- And so you wrote but there's also the I, right, that winds it way through. So it goes back and forth from Karen in third-person to the I, right.

- Yeah.

- Was that, did you do that initially, did you start it that way or that weave its way in?

- Yeah, you know it's interesting because I really thought of the Karen section as being much more like Laila's characters who are testifying, who are telling their own, you know their own angle on this shared experience. And so I think of Karen as being someone giving sort of a monologue but part of her thing is she's like oh, yeah, you're gonna tell Karen story. Well I can tell Karen story 'cause I am Karen so actually I think I know this story better than you. And so I think of that section as more a first-person section in which she goes into third to prove that she's better at it than the other storyteller was.

- Interesting. I was thinking about the I today and about it points in two directions. It points to, it's the Karen I that you're describing but there's also then suddenly the specter of the authorial I as well that comes up. I don't know if that was part of your thinking. It starts to, it just making memoir and fiction it's blurring those, right, intentionally I think.

- Yeah, yeah, I mean yes and no. I mean I think that really it's more honest to say that the voice to me was Karen's voice and Karen's voice playing with storytelling and Karen's voice playing with the idea of Karen's story and getting to tell it as opposed to having it told for her.

- You had mentioned writing in 2016 and I was wondering what is happening to your artistic processes to your ideas about what you wanna do in this America, right and also in this year that's leading up interminably to an election, right? What are you thinking about what you wanna be doing? What are you thinking about old, you both write quite political works and writing to this moment, you are writing to this moment politically, whether it's Islamophobia or whether it's sexual predation, right you are, I'm wondering just what your thought process is now as novelist about writing fiction for yourselves not like what the goal of the aim of fiction should be right now but what it's like for you personally?

- I think it's interesting how the word political is applied to fiction. I remember when my very first book came out that I, so I wrote, so my first book was called, "Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits" and it's about a group of immigrants who cross the Mediterranean on a lifeboat so it's told from different perspectives. And I remember I gave it to a friend of mine to read and she returned it and said, "It's a political book." And I was really taken by surprise because I thought well, what is politically about it? And then it took me a bit of time to realize that anytime you write where you have a character that's an immigrant then it becomes a political book. So the term political is applied to pretty much any book in which the center of the story is not a center of power. So anything that's not like about a white male, a rich white male doing I don't know what. And so I'm not, you know I'm kind of used to it now because it's been applied to pretty much everything that I've written. And with this book when it came out one of the very first questions that I was asked is whether it was response to Trump. Can you imagine that I would live my life as a writer like thinking about this person and writing stories an answer to this person. And the answer of course is no. You know I think about him enough on a daily basis. I don't need to think about him in fiction. And in any case the book I started working on it long before the election. My goal was to write a story about this family and in switching perspectives to sort of explore the unreliability of our reality. I remember after the election everybody was walking around or a certain number of people were walking around in a daze wondering what had just happened and what had just happened was that reality now was being presented from a completely different perspective. It doesn't mean that that perspective wasn't there. It was there all along it's just that people weren't aware of it or weren't listening to it. And it's interesting I only realized after I heard you talk about the process of writing this book and the switching of perspectives from Karen to, for bringing in Karen as a character that the switch from the third-person to the first and opening it up and bringing in more perspectives in this book happened in 2016 'cause I had done two or three drafts in the third-person. So it's right about that time that I had then switched to the first-person. And I did feel that by doing that then it really opened up the possibility of exploring different ways in which we interact with reality and how limited personal experience is. And this book gave me that opportunity.

- Yeah, I'm not sure how much I can add. I think it's really fascinating to think about this label of political as it's applied to fiction and I agree with you that the, I mean the label political as applied to literature has always fascinated me because I do think that it's deployed very, very frequently to label a minority a story of some kind. So whether it's a story about a person of color, whether it's a story about a, you know any sort of character who seems to occupy like a non-normative life position. It'll turn into like a political story. And a lot of my work has been called political almost of all my books have been called political although I've never set out to write a political story. And in fact the book that I refer to as having sort of given birth to "Trust Exercise" because of it's huge failure, it's ongoing failure is a book that I think is failing in part because it came out of certain preoccupation of mine that I now recognize as having been kind of consciously political which I think for a fiction writer can often be like death to the story. If you set out to tell a political story, a story that you conceive of in that way it often closes of the possibility of actual like bringing your characters to life and telling a story successfully. If you can do that then afterwards the reader often finds political meaning but I think it's harder for us to make meaning if we're setting out to be political in advance.

- It's interesting to hear you. I think it's a particularly American thing to think about political as a pejorative thing. When I say that I actually mean it. I think your work is deeply political both of your work in a great way. I mean that as a compliment. I do think that the industry and the culture both are very worried about producing work that can be seen as political. It marginalizes it some way or thinks that it's not artistic, right if it does that.

- Absolutely. I mean no and I wanna say like I'm very proud of my work being taken as being political.

- It's so political.

- I'm glad of it but I think the label is pejorative as it's usually applied in the marketplace of literature. And I've actually like written about this idea of the political novel. And I love this essay by, I think it's Morris Dickstein who talks about "Middlemarch" being kind of like the ultimate political novel because it's about life. And actually like every novel is political if you can actually view politics as being about the ways in which we live in the world.

- About power in general in any kind of a relationship between different people that involves a power imbalance is by definition gonna be political. I wonder if the reason that it is viewed so in this pejorative way, there is a certain policing that happens in calling books political, which is a way to sort of undermine them and say well if they're political than they can't be aesthetically accomplished. You know there's a bit of--

- They must be like pursuing some sort of agenda.

- Agenda.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Did your editors or agents for that matter but did your editors have any suggestions or concerns that you addressed in revision and if so could you take us through that?

- Sure so my editor at Pantheon is Erroll McDonald and he read, so I guess it was the draft after, I had basically conceived the entire story with all of the characters but everything was in the third-person and I remember he sent me an email and then we talked on the phone and he was very complementary. But he did ask one question and that question was, "Have you considered all of the other characters "that you've created "and what you might be missing from those perspectives?" And he said, "You know just think about it." And it was very interesting because he had been, you know he had sent me this very nice email and we're very proud to publish this book and so it was kind of like the choice between do I just leave it as is or do I actually consider this question seriously. And I considered the question very seriously. So seriously in fact that I spent a week weeping because I realized that I had to throw away the draft that I had finished and I started again. And started expanding it to different perspectives and trying out a different way of doing point of view. And then I felt so grateful because the fact that it was that question that led me to reconceive the book and to actually enjoy myself even more in the writing of it so yeah it was a great, great experience.

- Yeah.

- [Judith] My editor would write just a thought.

- Yes. Yeah, I'm so grateful for real thoughts that either the agent or the editor brings too. You know especially if it challenges what you have even though, yeah sometimes there's weeping when you're like oh no, that was a really good question. I have a wonderful, wonderful editor but I think even before my book found its way to the editor that I worked with, my agent had asked me a really galvanizing question because this book originally had a different ending. So my book is in three parts and the three parts grown progressively shorter so that the third part is the shortest part. And that was true of the draft that my agent saw but the third part was a completely different third part, completely different, having nothing in common with part three as it's in the book.

- It's really different.

- Really different. And my agent had said, "You know do you think "that this is actually, that this is the final section "of your book, do you think it's possible "that there's some other way that this book needs to end?" And I wept with despair. But the other wonderful thing that my agent said when I agreed that I didn't think the ending was right but what was the ending supposed to be. She said, "I think there's an upswept corner "in this book and that's where your ending is." In other words the ending was sort of already there. And this is something I tell my students all the time mostly because I stole it from Jane Smiley who has this wonderful essay about revision and about how--

- She's great.

- She's amazing, right. So I teach this essay which is called, "What the story teaches its writer". And it's about the fact that when you revise everything that you need to know about how to fix your work is already there.

- Is in your story.

- It's already there but it's a matter of finding it and seeing it. And when my agent said, "I think there's an upswept corner." This image was so beautiful to me and it also really took the pressure off in a way because I thought I bet there's a lot of like unwept corners and maybe there's not just one.

- So it opened up a lot of possibilities.

- Lots of different possibility and it thought if I can just find one of the possibilities it will be okay, yeah.

- In the case of that story because it wasn't set in the 1980s then that was a definitely upswept, you know corner that you could then revisit and flash it forward.

- Yeah.

- So interesting.

- Yeah so I found that corner, which was.

- Did you find it quickly?

- No I wrote four endings. Which did not happen quickly. But by the time I got to the fourth one I was like, "It's this corner."

- Because I'm done, I'm done now, right.

- It's a very clean house by the end.

- If there are, this is your opportunity to write a question if you'd had an opportunity to do that and if there, I don't know if they're coming up in a basket or how they're coming up but if you could find the person who is collecting them and bring them up I will ask some. I will ask another question or two in the meantime. Do we know who, Austin do we know who's collecting? There, there, okay, good, thanks. I have a question about the awards circuit, about awards and about how being nominated for or wining major awards affect you when you sit down to do the extremely solitary work that you know that you're gonna have to commit to and stay with for years probably and it's gonna require commitment and faith. Does it help to have like had a chance to do a victory lap from the last one? Does it create pressures that are, does it create pressures? I'm thinking about the relationship between yourselves sitting up here and the self that's sitting down at your desk and trying to get yourself settled and in a place to write.

- perspective.

- You wanna take this one Susan? You won.

- Not really. I spoke last.

- I mean I don't know about you but I wish I could say that you know winning this prize or being up for that prize or getting some kind of like notice for a book, or it doing well made it easier to write another book. I wish that that were true 'cause then you know, right, like life would be easier. All you have to do is get to that and then and it just for me anyway it just, I don't find that it changes anything. It doesn't even change your level of confidence because when, although you have experience. Experience and confidence are not the same thing and when I sit down to write another book, well first of all I always try to write something that's very different from the previous book and each one sort of teaches me how to write it. So it's a new journey each time. So you know anything else that's happened outside of it is essentially noise and it's not helping with the actual writing of the book, which has nothing to do with noise. It's the opposite of that. You have to dwell in silence and you have to you know be focused and it's just I don't know. I don't find that it makes it easier at all.

- Yeah, I agree completely. I think that there's a total disconnect in way between like the public work of sort of being an author and the private work of like sitting and home trying like not to have another snack and like, you know get to like whatever the word count is for that day. And I think that the thing that has been most helpful to me and you know maybe this is the same for you because at this point we're like that's sort of cringey term mid-career Writers, always like uh.

- And it happens in the blink of an eye you're like--

- I know.

- You're emergent and then suddenly you're--

- Yeah you go from emerging to like mid-career, like almost instantly. Yeah and mid-career sounds like midlife and midlife never sounds good. It's just not sexy. But I think what has been helpful about like this mid-career place is accumulating a lot of experience of being lost, and frustrated, and rudderless and writing hundreds of pages that never go anywhere, and having no ideas, and being in despair. And you know the great thing about the mid-career is that you can go, oh, all of these bad things have happened before. Like all of the really fallow moments start to form a pattern. Where you're like all right this is like a large scale pattern and the pattern also seems to consist of like every once in a while finishing something. So that's reassuring.

- Great.

- That was suppose to be cheering.

- I suspected it was not going to be cheering and so, which is partly why I wanted to ask. Should I say the names of the people? You wrote your names. No. Maybe I won't. This is for Susan, how did anger or rage influence "Trust Exercise"? Can you elaborate on how anger affects your writing practice? Is it enabling?

- That's a great question.

- [Judith] That's actually from Gina Rodriguez .

- Thank you for that question. I would say that in general anger is not helpful to my writing practice but in this specific instance it was very helpful. I think the other interesting thing about the mid-career is realizing that there is no one way that you do things. Like I think earlier in my career I thought I figured out the way to do things. And now I've realized no, there's no one way. This book was really different for me and one thing that was really different was at that some point in the middle of this book when I wasn't even really taking it seriously as a project I became incredibly angry. I was in a state of like almost constant rage just walking around with you know a voice of rage in my head that actually made it almost impossible to hear anything else. It's not a fun way to feel. But it was really, really productive for a brief period of time I sat down and I wrote Karen's section really more rapidly than I've ever written anything. And I changed it very little for publication, which is also very rare for me. So I did just have kind of like a rage fit.

- Wow, that sort of makes sense for that section too. Yeah, wow.

- More than one person wants to know what the original third part was. If you'd like tell us about it.

- There were, as I said there were four parts three. And the first of the parts three was, it was centered on David and. And then the second one might of also been about David and then the third one was about Liam, strangely enough if anybody can remember who that is. And then--

- [Judith] Ew.

- And then, harsh. And my agent didn't say this although she might have been trying to say this with the upswept corner comment but my best friend who's also one of my most trusted readers said, "I'm not sure if we want to hear a man's voice "at the end of the book." And I said, "Oh, that's a thought."

- Yeah.

- This is for Laila, can you talk about the research or personal experience behind Jeremy's experience of Iraq and how he interacted with people on his return from war, specifically with Nora?

- Sure, thank you for that question. Remember when I said earlier that you sort of have to lie to yourself in order to begin a book and I thought very naively this is a book that start with a hit and run, a car comes out of nowhere kills this guy that happens on the first page and then everything else is set in the here and now. I know that area well it's gonna be easy. Boy, oh boy, so I had to do a ton of research about for example hit and runs but one of the, not as simple as it sounds.

- [Judith] And white paint.

- Yes, I mean anyway but with respect to this character the way that he started out for me is that I suffer from insomnia. I don't know if any of you have that. And I thought why should I suffer alone so I'm gonna saddle one of my characters with it. And then I started to think well why does he stay up at night? And then I thought oh, well maybe he keeps thinking about something and then I was like, oh, well you know and so then that's the idea of the sort of veteran character. And I realized with writing something like or somebody like that I had to do a lot of research. So I read, well first of all I was, at the time that the Iraq War was unfolding I became, and I don't use this word lightly obsessed with it. And I was, as it was unfolding reading about it constantly and writing about it also. But in order to write from that particular perspective I read a number of novels that were written by veterans of the Iraq War. I read books about, non fiction books about the Iraq War also by veterans. I read, let's see, I just basically ended up doing a lot of reading. I watched training videos for the Marines. The book is set in Joshua Tree, which is near 29 Palms. which is the largest Marine base in the world. It's 937 square miles. And when you spend some time in Joshua Tree sometimes you can hear the Marines when they're doing live fire exercises so just being in town you see a lot of that Marine presence. So I had plenty of opportunity to interact with people there. I've had students who are veterans. So I basically just started to pay attention, and to notice, and to research. Now having done all of that it equipped me with some of the language, some of the jargon that Marines use or veterans use anyway and all of that was helpful. At the same time I had to in a sense let go of it because I was trying to create the character and so all of that was helpful in sort of creating the miniature of his world. But the heart of it, the person was somebody that I had to relate to as another human being. As though I might relate to myself. And so that's a different part of the work I think.

- Yeah, I feel as though the research is partly there. It turns out to give you confidence in authority. It's not to take from it.

- Yeah.

- You gain it and then you let it go, right, for a while, yeah. Somebody wrote, when I get asked about the sort of fiction I'm interested in I usually say, "I like work about the world "rather than work about the self." Might this be a way to reinscribe so-called political writing in a non-pejorative way? Yes. Yes. Is there anything else you wanna add about that or? We're very concerned here with elevating the, with resuscitating the political. That's . As not, it's market avatar, right. It's avatar as a market entity.

- I mean everything's political so.

- That's the thing. Okay, moving on. I think I'll read just one more. Are we good for time? I can keep going. Basically I'm reading the ones that are the most legible at this point. In the trust exercise what do you consider are exercised? Do you think society today needs to undergo such exercise? So maybe just talk about trust exercises.

- Wait, can I hear that again?

- Yeah, in the trust exercise what do you consider are exercised? Do you think or what kind of trust maybe is exercised? Do you think society today needs to undergo such exercise?

- That's a really interesting question. I'm not sure if I understand exactly. I'm gonna just riff here because the book actually has these literal trust exercises in it that are exercises that the acting students do under the direction of their teacher. And the trust exercises in this book are actually from Sanford Meisner sort of technique of teaching acting or they're adapted. And Sanford Meisner was you know and enormously influential teacher of acting and performance and so many of his exercises involved repetition. Two people facing each other repeating back and forth and the exercises were designed to essentially break down their participants and to, I may be getting this wrong because I was very, very young when I exposed to Meisner technique so I might not have gotten it. But it's about as I experienced it breaking people down and sort of eliciting emotion. And something that was every interesting to me about Meisner technique was that you know there was a period during which I was researching a novel on Scientology, which I never wrote either and never will write. But I was really obsessed with Scientology and I read a lot about it. And while I was reading about Scientology and about various practices in the church of Scientology specifically practices that are used on new members to kind of draw them into Scientology and to turn them into Scientologist, one of the, there were all of these techniques that I recognized. And I realized that they were Meisner technique. They're actually the same thing but Scientology gives them different names. And you can google this and you can find sort of Church of Scientology like videos in which people like do repetition exercises until one of them like has a breakdown. And the purpose of these exercises in Scientology is explicitly to break people down and kind of subsume them into a conformist structure in which their selfhood is voided in favor of this what I would call a cult. But you know that's a controversial position. And so I think it's interesting that, and so no, I don't think that these trust exercises are sort of, have like a wider social utility because I think that what they prove to be useful for is creating conformity and quashing individuality in a very powerful and kind of disturbing way.

- Well very interesting. It's making me thinking about training for the Army what you're saying.

- Yeah, which is a similar process.

- Yeah, it's breaking of the individual where they can't even use, and this goes back to the research question but they can't even use I. So when they are in bootcamp they say things like this recruit like you talk about so it's, and everything is yes or no sir and so it's very interesting. It goes to what you were saying about how the exercises are designed to create conformity and to, it's very interesting.

- I'll ask one more question, a little bit about trust exercises. It's about readership because it's also in someways a trust exercise with us, right. It's a challenging book. And make certain kind of demands of the reader. So what I wanna ask you both is, is there a reader, or an ideal reader, or a reader that you have in mind when you are writing that sometime you're just checking against?

- You're still thinking.

- I am still thinking.

- I think probably the answer and this is gonna sound very self-centered but I think the answer is it's me. I don't really think about a reader, an abstract sort of reader out there. I don't even think like, I mean with "Trust Exercise" it's a book that involves teenage characters for many of its pages and I didn't certainly think about it as like YA novel versus an adult novel. I mean it's not YA novel but I don't really, no, I don't really think about a reader. I think that I'm always the reader that I'm trying to please. I'm hard to please.

- One of the interesting things about this book is that it implicates the reader in the sense that the reader knows everything about all the perspectives that are presented in the book but each of the characters obviously only knows their own perspective. So in a way the reader gets the sort of more complete picture and all of the different biases and misinterpretations that each of them is having. And so it's kind of interesting when you think about a reader for something like that. I would say that I write for a reader like myself, which is maybe a little bit different than reader who is myself. And that means yes, kind of checking and like oh, this was funny or this wasn't funny, or you know. And trying not to talk down to that reader. Talking to that reader as if I would talk to myself if that makes any sense, yeah. I think also thinking about readers is a more dangerous thing in writing as opposed to just reader who is like myself. I think that it is a very short step between thinking about readers and wanting to please readers. And I think that wanting to please readers can be very dangerous for the active creation. Because then it makes it about approval as opposed to about exploration. And so that's why it's much more fun when you think about yourself or at least you're only pleasing yourself and not trying to please other people.

- Well thank you both very much. It was pleasure talking to you.

- Thank you. Thanks.